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Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception

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Noam Chomsky said one day “all over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” Seeing how consumerism has taken an important part in the society and how it has affected members of the society in many ways.
Consumerism is a phenomenon that has been gaining strength with the passage of time that it has been affected the society through advertising, as illustrated in the chapter “Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” of the book “Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argues that “[social media, television], radio and magazines [are used] to manipulate the masses ” in order to that the society feels that it is necessary to consume new products to meet their true” needs. …show more content…

According to Merriam-Webster, consumerism refers to “the belief that it is good for people to spend a lot of money on goods and services " (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consumerism). In addition, consumerism may be referred to “the theory that a progressively greater consumption of goods is economically beneficial; Attachment to materialistic values or possessions “ (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/consumerism). This term brings us to the idea that consumerism influences the economy of people in today’s

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Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in “The Culture Industry as Mass Deception,” conclude that mass culture in the United States is identical and unoriginal “under monopoly capitalism” (Adorno, Horkheimer 1242). The Matrix (1999), directed by the Wachowski siblings, is about a group of enlightened outsiders who wage a war against the machines in control of human beings, who are subdued and experiencing a false reality through a simulation called the Matrix. In this paper, I will describe how the film, while seemingly original in its concept of questioning reality and rejecting conformity, ultimately succumbs to the cliches and stylizations of mass culture/media, failing to break from the formula Adorno and Horkheimer criticize. One of the most important points Adorno

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Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism defines the abstraction of a product’s true value with a “magical” presentation of product through advertising and institutional brand name policies. The dominance of the bourgeoisie/capitalist owner classes illustrates the power of commodity fetishism that promotes products to the proletariat/consumer in the marketplace. The fetish qualities of product detract from the physicality of the production process, which is then diluted through advertising promotions for the unwary consumer. This type of promotion is a great problem for consumers, since many of them may tricked into buying a faulty or unhealthy product through brand-name trickery. More so, consumers may become addicted to their desires in the purchasing of a product, which only alienates them from better products that may actually improve their lives.

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“In general, sociological interest in the move to mass consumption in the second half of the nineteenth century was restricted to indicating the limitations of strictly economic or market explanations of human behavior.” (Featherstone, 2010: 16) By contrast the British cultural studies reject any high/low culture distinction created by the Frankfurt School, instead taking seriously the artifacts of media culture “thus surpassing the elitism of dominant literary approaches to culture.” (Kellner). British cultural studies overcame the limitations created by the Frankfurt School notion of a passive audience, completely numb by the cultural products fed to them and created the concept of an active audience that creates their meanings and what is popular.

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Adorno and Horkheimer drew from Marx with regards to capitalism. According to Lorimer and Scannell (1994), “Following Marx, they saw the application of capitalist methods to cultural production as exploitative of the mass of the production” (p. 165). Adorno and Horkheimer believed that mass culture due to capitalism makes it homogenous. The audience then becomes homogenous and unified. Baofu (2009) further explains the culture industry as, “Popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.”

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Theodore Adorno attempted to explain many different sociological and philosophical matters but it is in his extensive critique of mass entertainment where his most prominent and most controversial ideas come to light. He was one of the first intellectuals to identify the possible social power of the entertainment industry. He also saw the social phenomena that arose from mass entertainment as signs of domination. These concepts that Adorno began to develop lead him to coin maybe his most famous idea. This is known as “The Culture Industry”.

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People are immersed in popular culture during most of our waking hours. It is on radio, television, and our computers when we access the Internet, in newspapers, on streets and highways in the form of advertisements and billboards, in movie theaters, at music concerts and sports events, in supermarkets and shopping malls, and at religious festivals and celebrations (Tatum,

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